Mirage of the shifting sands: The UN is planning another counterattack against advancing deserts. But will it work? And is more land really becoming arid?

By FRED PEARCE

United Nations is poised to draw up a convention to halt desertification,
the process by which fertile land turns into desert. But are the world’s
deserts really spreading – and if so, why? The short answer is that nobody
knows, and that spells trouble for the convention. One reason for our ongoing
ignorance, say many scientists, is the poor quality of research in the 15
years since the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) claimed a global mandate
to address desertification.

Almost since the beginning of the century, both French and British colonial
scientists have spoken about the ‘advancing sands’ of the Sahara. They variously
blamed diminishing rains and the activities of shifting cultivators and
nomadic cattle herders. In 1949 the French geographer Andre Aubreville coined
the term ‘desertification’ to describe how ‘deserts are being born today
under our very eyes’.

The first quantified assessment appears to have come from the US government’s
Agency for International Development. In 1972, the USAID claimed, without
citing specific evidence, that ‘there has been a net advance in some places
along a 2000-mile southern front of as much as 30 miles a year’.

The idea of an advancing desert front caught on, particularly after
drought and famine devastated the Sahel – the desert margins south of the
Sahara – in the early 1970s. It crystallised at the UN Conference on Desertification,
held in Nairobi in 1977. The conference launched UNEP’s Plan of Action to
Combat Desertification, a global initiative that promoted preventive measures
such as planting trees on sand dunes.

The initiative was a failure. Spending on anti-desertification projects
since has been around $6 billion, …

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